Then, I received a text from my good friend Dillon, who is faithfully in bed by 10 PM every night.

"Please be safe. Wherever you are, and whatever you're doing."

"How are you handling everything?" I responded.

"I don't know how to process it. I went for a walk this morning and didn't make it far before I just started crying. I don't know what else to do."

Dillon is a 23-year-old black man. He has two parents. He comes from a "good" home. He's been college educated—twice. And he is terrified. Many, many young black people are.

We are scared, sad, angry, and tired. Are we next? Will I see someone who looks like my father restrained then shot in the head on my timeline today? Will our mothers and little sisters come home tonight, and even if they do, what will they have seen on their way? Will America ever stop seeing us as her enemy and start seeing us as her children?

The calls, texts and tweets from troubled friends haven't stopped. In the weeks following Dillon's, we've seen more protests and arrests, the funerals of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, another deadly attack on police, another black man shot by a police officer (while laying on the ground with his hands IN THE AIR) and a national political convention that vehemently denied the rationality of our fears. In fact, the Republican National Convention essentially told us we're the threat. Screams and sobs itching for release have been densely packed in my throat and cheeks for weeks.

While I and many of my contemporaries have only been attuned to state violence against black bodies for the past few years, for decades scholar-activists like Melissa Harris-Perry andJelani Cobb have been fighting the very same fear andracial exhaustion we are feeling now. On July 8, they sat down at ELLE.com for a Facebook Live conversation on the Black Lives Matter movement, the Dallas shootings, and state violence. I asked them how we should treat ourselves. What texts, music, and art would they prescribe to myself and my friends who are emotionally beaten down from being black in America?

These are the works that they, I, and the people I turn to for comfort recommend to help us to understand, to mourn, and to replenish our spirits.

"It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains." –Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Throughout the List, you'll see me refer to Melissa Harris-Perry as Professor—because before she was my mentor here at ELLE.com, she was my teacher. This past spring, she offered a course entitled "Black Lives Matter: Perspectives on Blackness, State Violence and Resistance," in which we contextualized the long history of racial justice and non-violent, anti-racist political movements within academic, historical, social scientific, and legal frameworks. Our downloadable syllabus is a lengthy list of books, chapters, scholarly and journalistic articles, and videos. The course gave me important language with which to rationalize and articulate the way white supremacy and sexism lead to dire consequences globally. It also gave me the language to fight back.

"Strive" by Miles Hodges and Carvens Lissaint

Poets Miles Hodges and Carvens Lissaint are members of The Strivers Row. The collective of spoken word artists of color have consistently been dropping soul-shaking pieces around the black experience for years. Hodges' and Lissaint's anthemic piece "Strive" is powerful call to persist in the face of both personal and political challenges. "Strive like you're a marching band of single mothers and you know your kids' dreams so you know you gotta make it," Hodges implores us. "Strive like you know prisons are manmade but minds are God made, so Harlem Shake that Gospel out of your bones. Strive. Strive. Strive."

Assata Shakur's self-titled autobiography is a testament to how one challenges the state and what might come of it. Assata's story is a familiar one: in 1973, she and two others are pulled over by New Jersey police officers for a faulty tail light. The encounter ended with both a trooper and Shakur's activist-friend dead, and Assata wrongfully convicted of the officer's murder. As she tells her story of growing into a Black Panther icon and the first woman on the FBI's list of Most Wanted Terrorists, she shows us what expression against the decimation of black lives looks like.

Be Free Remix By Kelechi

ATL rapper Kelechi occupies a unique place in blackness—he is a first generation American, born to West African immigrants (as am I). It is unfair to ignore the way that can make experiences of being black in America different. Our parents are
slightly more likely to have a college degree than the average American and are nearly 10% less likely to be living in poverty than black people born in the U.S. However, in his cover of J. Cole's stirring "Be Free," Kelechi meditates on the trauma of watching people who look like us succumb to state violence, and the fact that class or code-switching may not save him either. "Dr. King got shot and he was in a suit," he passionately proclaims.

Jelani Cobb calls the titular single on Marvin Gaye's hit album "What's
Going On" a "sermon in that era that is applicable to what's happening in
this era." The song is easy listening if your heart is heavy. It's light,
melodic, and soulful. However, the entire album, including tracks titled "Save the Children" and "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" provided a soundtrack to the confusion and instability of the Civil Rights era. It "centered around themes of poverty, police brutality, drug abuse and injustice in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination […] with lyrics written from the perspective of a Vietnam war veteran," writes The Guardian. The record will
soon be the subject of a documentary, set for release in 2017.

CHANCERAPS.COM

Anything by Chance the Rapper (But Start With His Mixtape Coloring Book)

It is okay if recent violent imagery doesn't make us miserable all of the time. This is something Professor Harris-Perry ingrained in me. "My friend Michael Arceneaux […] always says, 'I don't do sad, and I don't do pitiful.' His reaction in this moment is not to fall apart but to become aggressively joyful," Harris-Perry explained. "Sometimes I want […] something that's joyful and fun in order to remember that we create beautiful things." Chance's music and persona embodies black joy and creativity. He wants us to dance, to bond, and to give thanks for the grace that touches all of our lives, in spite of the ugliness that touches it too. "I woke up this morning, I gotta smile when I say that sh*t—I woke up this morning!" Chance exclaims on his single, "Somewhere in Paradise."

"Beautiful Black Men" by Nikki Giovanni

As a sixth grader, I was first introduced to poet Nikki Giovanni by Kanye West when he compared his mother to a book of her poetry—"Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, turn one page and there's my mommy." Giovanni's writings are often a celebration of and meditation on ordinary and extraordinary black Americans. Professor Harris-Perry says that she looks to poetry, and Giovanni especially, because "when things are this bad, I find it hard to read long things." Sometimes, we need short, smooth, funny, thirsty things like her poem Beautiful Black Men from her 1970 anthology Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement.

Jelani Cobb recommends this short story specifically to black men as they determine the value of their lives for themselves. In "Three Men," a young black man meets two very different men while imprisoned for a violent crime in the old American south. Under the council of these two men, the protagonist must decide whether to serve the extent of his time, or be freed—but forever indebted to the wealthy white man willing to intervene. All of the "Bloodline" stories of black life in the rural south at the turn of the 20th century hauntingly highlight modern conversations around race, power, poverty, gender, and sexuality. Maybe it will help all of us make sense of where we are now.

One of Morrison's most loved and poetic novels, "Beloved" is a southern Gothic tale of former slaves reconciling with their heinous past. And while the imagery of plantation violence is intense, Beloved is a story about love. In the wake of the deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the five police officers monitoring a peaceful protest in Dallas, Texas, Professor Harris-Perry posted an excerpt from the classic on social media. In it, a spiritual leader among the community of freed African-Americans (Baby Suggs) begs them to love their own black flesh—"[I]n this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh"—everything about them their former masters despised. Everything about us that is still the subject of both covert and overt hate.

When my Soror Kristin has had a bad day at work, she turns to A Different World. Airing from 1984 to 1993, the television sitcom chronicled the lives of undergrads at a fictional historically Black college, becoming both an ode to diversity within black America and to the possibilities of social and economic mobility. Taking its role of one of few shows of the era to center black young people seriously, the sitcom touched on real-life issues from stereotyping, to the L.A. Riots of 1992, to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. A Different World is funny, real, and good for thinking about—or stepping away from—our current world. Lucky for us, it's streaming on Netflix and Hulu.

Calling Fire Next Time "the foundational black-man-coming-of-age text," Professor Harris-Perry described the short essay anthology as one that grapples with black masculinity in the context of the American project in the 21st century. The text begins with Baldwin's letter to his nephew on the cusp of Emancipation's 100th anniversary, and goes on to ask and answers universal questions about blackness, religion, and social progress.

Poet Langston Hughes was fascinated by black resilience. Our patience is the theme of many of his most famous works, like "Harlem", "Mother to Son", and "Warning". Hughes, who was born in 1902 and passed in 1967, was amazed by the continued ability of black folks to dream of prosperity, of equality—of freedom—even in the midst of brutal segregation and disenfranchisement. And while Hughes not only felt the weight of racism, but as a gay man, homophobia as well, he clung to hope. Professor Harris-Perry reveres Hughes's work for the way he pushes us to do the same. Read the full version of "I, Too", and many of his other poems here.

VRY BLK by Jamila Woods feat. Noname

"It's like [Jamila Woods] channeled all of the rage we can't figure out how to release healthily, and gave us this melody," my friend Nick explained. "She transforms a school yard nursery rhyme to a celebration of blackness, and into a battle cry as well." To the tune of "Miss Mary Mack," she sings "I'm very black, black, black, can't send me back, back, back, you take my brother, brother, brother—I fight back, back, back, back."

Nikki Giovanni rose to fame in the late 1960s during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and she is still about the business of telling our stories. "Allowables" was published in 2013 following the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd, and less than a year before, the deaths of Mike Brown and Tamir Rice. The poem expresses the heart of our anger and sadness—just because you may have been socialized to be frightened by black people, Mr. Officer, does not mean we deserve to die. "Allowables" is an entry in her most recent book Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid.

"Balaenoptera" by Joshua Bennett

Imagine that we will all live—that we all did live—long, glorious lives, uninterrupted by the bullets of a gun issued for our protection. At 80, what words would you use to describe the love of your life? Acclaimed Strivers Row artist Joshua Bennett preforms this gorgeous poem as a love letter to his partner in their old age, reminding us of all we have to live for. He imagines the moment he asks his lover how they came to be: "When all those well-dressed jackals came galloping to your door, begging for the rights to your ring finger, what made you lock the deadbolt on your ribs? Looking them squarely in the face, and saying with joy 'I am saving all of this beauty for a man I've never even met'?"

My intellectual sparring partner, travel buddy, and partner-in-petty, Jamiel, got serious and recommended that we add D'Angelo's most recent studio album to the List, "A Messiah is a savoir, you know? D'Angelo came back after a long hiatus and delivered the type of R&B we missed, saving us from the growing monotony of modern music—he gives us the types of jazz and funk we can share with our moms and dads and aunties and uncles. I get lost in this album. I get lost in how optimistic its sounds. Lost in the lyrics of tracks like "Really Love" and "Ain't That Easy". In times of political and social hopelessness, it's like D'Angelo serenades you back to your happy place. I'm allowed to get lost in my blackness with this album."

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